According to/b/ (which usually means you should treat it with a pinch of salt) the guy being interviewed complaining about things is called Alex Wuori, a former visitor to the site who ended up with a grudge against it and contacted the news station. They probably got all their "facts" from him explaining the sensationalist outlook.
If you were doing this purely because of the ability to change the MAC you don't have to, most network card drivers have an option to allow this to be overridden.
"He then wrote computer algorithms that can capture a vehicle's length as it passes over a detector. Once a vehicle of similar length passed over the next loop, the computer could match the two signals and calculate the vehicle's travel time. Based on each car's travel time, the software was able to determine within three and a half minutes after traffic began to slow that a traffic jam had formed."
I'm probably missing something here but how do they determine the length of the car when they don't know it's speed. Surely a small car moving slowly would record a similar reading to a longer car moving faster.
While I realise this isn't answering the question based on my experiences with disk catalog software I would say that unless you are very short of money copying the drives to hard disk is the way forward.
The problems I found were... If you have been unorganised when assembling these CDs full of files then a catalog of the contents doesn't help much. If you don't know a filename (and the filename is obfuscated) then you're going to have a hard time finding it. If your search brings back several potential results then having to insert all the CDs to find the correct one, rather than opening or previewing from the network is very inconvenient. If you decide you want to make things easier to find and do some organising you can't do this while you're still storing things on the same cluttered media.
I copied everything to an array and it's much better. As a bonus I'm able to do backups of the files and am not at the mercy of bitrot on the CDs. I do still keep the occasional CD or DVD but only where there are only one or two things on the disk and so the disk can manually be labeled with the contents.
The Freedom of Information Act does apply to the BBC, however it could not be used for this purpose. Firstly there is an exclusion in FOI which says you cannot specify the format of the information - i.e. if they have it in a table you can't request a pie chart. Additionally information already published cannot be made the subject of a FOI request and there is an exclusion for information that is commercially sensitive. All in all the chances of getting the latest Dr Who are small.
The second more important part is that even after a successful FOIA request the document you have obtained is still under Crown Copyright and consequently you cannot republish it without a licence. There are some petitions on the "Dear Prime Minister" site which ask that UK Government funded publications be placed into the Public Domain by default instead - were this to ever happen it may have the desired effect on the BBC.
I certainly haven't had any problems with the service offered by Dell - but then again we do have the Gold support etc. If you wanted to do some more research yourself you could try buying a PC from several places and seeing yourself what the level of service they provided was - or perhaps asking if they could put you in touch with another customer to get a reference.
I disagree with the comments from people suggesting going with a local "white box" vendor. With Dell and others you can purchase machines for 2 years knowing that the specification will be exactly the same, and that you'll be able to get parts for them for several years after that. The benefits you can get from this in terms of automated builds, consistent environments and simplified inventories shouldn't be underestimated.
One other thing, which I'm suprised hasn't been mentioned elsewhere (that I can see) is the recent Dell decision to ship machines with Ubuntu on. While I wouldn't advocate making a technological business decision based on "good will" you might feel that the promise of good hardware support in future should you ever want to move them to Linux was worth considering.
FOIA only applies to UK Government institutions and companies that are owned by the government. Additionally even if Microsoft did fall under it's scope there is an exclusion for commercially sensitive documents.
If the value of a company is based in part on the amount of interlectual property it owns, or thinks it owns then having large numbers of them declared invalid even if unrelated to directly to Linux etc. would hurt them.
No. If men were funding breast cancer resarch because they were worried about their women becoming mono-breasted then they'd be even more keen to ensure that they didn't become mono-testicled (assuming the parent means testicular and not prostate cancer). If that was the problem we'd just invent better fake breasts anyway.
I think Dylan Moran summed up the problem well...
"A big erm health scare on for men for testicular cancer, now that's a pretty scary thing there... women don't get that so much. And it's a very difficult thing coz you have to look for a lump...in a bag of lumps, and that can take a long time. And you have to do it yourself, because nobody actually wants to touch male genitalia anyway coz it looks like some kind of deep sea fish, you know that became extinct after about an half an hour, it just didn't do very well. And it's a very difficult thing, you have to do it yourself, you have to touch yourself. And as a man you are designed to be aroused by most naturally occurring phenomena on the plant. You know if you see a big bag of wheat or a bit of falling masonry, that can get you going. So...actually to touch yourself can be very dangerous, you can have 38 erections in a half an hour and get a very bad nose bleed. And its extremely important not to tell anybody if you do find one coz you know what will happen, they lift you shoulder high through the streets going "lump, lump, lump!" and throw you in prison. And then little men will come in and beat you with spoons. That's what happens, they cover it up but that's what happens."
...is probably what you want - and KMail appears to support it.
Alternatively Thunderbird certainly supports cache'ing a copy of messages for working offline but I'm not sure if it supports the kind of resyncing that you're looking for.
What I'd like to know is the size and power requirements. Something like this could be quite useful in high-rise buildings. Pumping water to the upper levels requires a significant amount of power. If instead we could put a few of these on tops of buildings and use them to bring water down, we might see a net win in terms of supply and energy usage.
Or, if it did turn out to take less energy to obtain water from the air at heights than to bring it up there then if we had a very efficient hydro power system in the building we could just drop the water down, get back the potential energy... and voila - cheap power:)
...that I can see justifying the extra clauses in V3 is one where all the major computer manufacturers decide that their computers will only run those operating systems that are certified with them. Businesses might not object to this (if it was sold as having "security benefits") and so there wouldn't be enough of a market for people who wanted to run their own versions to justify a new "GPL Friendly" hardware company, at least not with the resources that Intel/AMD have at their disposal. The problem with attempting to use the GPL to rememdy this problem is that if the hardware manufactuer is building a check into the hardware but shipping the hardware without the software then the GPL probably doesn't apply to them. It might apply to any OEM shipping Linux with the hardware but I'm sure they'd get round the legal problems by making a click-through that put the responsibility for the combining of the two on to the end user.
For the other lesser cases where there isn't such a barrier to entry I don't see that there's a problem. If someone makes a DVD player that is unmodifyable and publishes the source of it's operating system then if there's a market for a modfiyable one a competitor can simply take the published source and build a competing product. There can also be some legitimate reasons to prevent people from modifying software - "If the work communicates with an online service, it must be possible for modified versions to communicate with the same online service in the same way such that the service cannot distinguish." - sounds to me like it would be impossible to make a GPL'd game that did any kind of hacked client prevention.
I think a likely outcome of all this is that any hardware manufacturer who would be likely to fall foul of these clauses will simply switch to using a non-GPL operating system, commercial or BSD and consequently Linux will miss out on contributions to infrastruture such as embedded cpu support that it might otherwise have recieved. The MPAA (or whoever it is who controls it) may also choose not to grant licences to hardware manufactuers who produce devices can run modified code that they fear could be used to circumvent their DRM.
Last year we were interviewing for a helpdesk position and one of the candidates mentioned that he'd written tools to aid posting to LiveJournal. This meant that there was a good chance he had an LJ himself so, out of interest we did some googling and found it.
In it he had written...
-That he was currently suspended from work for misuse of IT equipment. -That his current duties were less technical than the impression he'd given in the interview. -That he wasn't really interested in the position we were offering and would be hoping to leave within a few months.
Needless to say he didn't get the position.
His blog also went into some detail about his sexual fetishes. This wouldn't have been a reason not to employ him, but it might have made things a bit awkward in the office especially with him not knowing we knew and such.
We have the same problems at work with the random Citrix printing problems and I'm hoping an upgrade to PS4 etc. soon will fix it.
If it doesn't I've been thinking about just installing a PDF printer driver onto the Citrix servers, configured to either e-mail the files to the user or put it onto a share. For the kind of reports that the users do from Citrix this would be fine, with the added bonus that they have an electronic copy they can send to people if needed.
So as a result some enterprising individual is running a dedicated typosquatting service. In fact it has been running it for quite a while.
I'm afraid the less exciting truth is that it's just my chosen e-mail address and vhost. The domain gets very little misaddressed traffic, much less than I used to get when I had a named account on a shared ISP domain.
One hurdle online gaming has to overcome is the low lifespan of each game, from my experience they tend to have a mainstream competative lifespan of about 5 years max (Starcraft being the only exception I can think of). This makes it hard to justify resources spent on promoting leagues if they're only going to last one or two seasons.
Scenario B: BadCorp's box has DRM-like hardware which refuses to run any code not signed by BadCorp's private key B. They use a modified, signed copy of Linux as the OS. They make available the source of their modifications (which are pretty much specific to their hardware) but nobody else can modify the kernel running on a BadCorp box because they don't have key B.
Then... GoodCorp produces their own box using the same, or even different hardware to BadCorp's box. They then use the GPL'd source from the first to take onboard all BadCorp's "nifty bits". Everyone buys GoodCorp brand products and there is much rejoicing.
The only situation where this wouldn't work is where people wanted to use BadCorp's ongoing services. While I can see there's a desire to be able to hack everything I don't think it unreasonable that an online gaming service could require that only a console running their signed code was allowed to compete, as that seems to be a separate contract distinct from the supply of the hardware/software.
This removes all incentive for labels to pick up new artists. Why add more music to a $4.95/month library when you can spin off a subsidiary label and release new music under it. Then once that library has grown for a few years, release it under another $5/month contract. Now the consumer is coughing up $10/month for full access to both labels, not to mention any competitor labels.
What I'd do would be to try to get away from the amount of money an artist earns being directly related to their record sales. I think a model more closely modeled on professional atheletes would be better, a studio would pay a yearly wage to an artist and for that they'd get exclusive access to their work (and possibly their back catalogue). As an artist's popularity went down they'd be paid less which would then free up money for new bands. Some artists would probably choose to become "self employed" and cut out the middle man.
Assuming that this study isn't a load of crap then it's possible that it coincides with an increase in the availability of childrens TV to passively babysit kids. Cheaper consumer electroncis allowing kids to have their own TVs, the invention of video recorders and satellite channels with only children's programs have all made this easier to do.
Does anyone know if there are any implementations of RAID which use power management? I haven't seen settings mentioned in the bios of any cards I've looked and I've got a feeling that the drives aren't being powered down. Would Linux's software RAID be better for this?
What (I think) you're asking for is an alternative CDDB source for track information when ripping your CDs? If this is the case then, to my knowledge there are only two CDDB (now Gracenote and commercial) and FreeDB. Both of these accept submissions from the general public so you can't guarantee that what they choose to clasify the artists as will be in line with your own opinion.
You can always edit the tracks afterwards, I use the already recommended Tag&Rename myself however there are a number of open source utilities which are just as good especially if you're not using Windows.
Another alternative might be to try Musicbrainz which identifies individual tracks using some kind of hash of the song itself and might have "better" genres assigned to artists.
Slashdot Mirror
According to /b/ (which usually means you should treat it with a pinch of salt) the guy being interviewed complaining about things is called Alex Wuori, a former visitor to the site who ended up with a grudge against it and contacted the news station. They probably got all their "facts" from him explaining the sensationalist outlook.
If you were doing this purely because of the ability to change the MAC you don't have to, most network card drivers have an option to allow this to be overridden.
"He then wrote computer algorithms that can capture a vehicle's length as it passes over a detector. Once a vehicle of similar length passed over the next loop, the computer could match the two signals and calculate the vehicle's travel time. Based on each car's travel time, the software was able to determine within three and a half minutes after traffic began to slow that a traffic jam had formed."
I'm probably missing something here but how do they determine the length of the car when they don't know it's speed. Surely a small car moving slowly would record a similar reading to a longer car moving faster.
While I realise this isn't answering the question based on my experiences with disk catalog software I would say that unless you are very short of money copying the drives to hard disk is the way forward.
The problems I found were...
If you have been unorganised when assembling these CDs full of files then a catalog of the contents doesn't help much. If you don't know a filename (and the filename is obfuscated) then you're going to have a hard time finding it.
If your search brings back several potential results then having to insert all the CDs to find the correct one, rather than opening or previewing from the network is very inconvenient.
If you decide you want to make things easier to find and do some organising you can't do this while you're still storing things on the same cluttered media.
I copied everything to an array and it's much better. As a bonus I'm able to do backups of the files and am not at the mercy of bitrot on the CDs. I do still keep the occasional CD or DVD but only where there are only one or two things on the disk and so the disk can manually be labeled with the contents.
The Freedom of Information Act does apply to the BBC, however it could not be used for this purpose. Firstly there is an exclusion in FOI which says you cannot specify the format of the information - i.e. if they have it in a table you can't request a pie chart. Additionally information already published cannot be made the subject of a FOI request and there is an exclusion for information that is commercially sensitive. All in all the chances of getting the latest Dr Who are small.
The second more important part is that even after a successful FOIA request the document you have obtained is still under Crown Copyright and consequently you cannot republish it without a licence. There are some petitions on the "Dear Prime Minister" site which ask that UK Government funded publications be placed into the Public Domain by default instead - were this to ever happen it may have the desired effect on the BBC.
I certainly haven't had any problems with the service offered by Dell - but then again we do have the Gold support etc. If you wanted to do some more research yourself you could try buying a PC from several places and seeing yourself what the level of service they provided was - or perhaps asking if they could put you in touch with another customer to get a reference.
I disagree with the comments from people suggesting going with a local "white box" vendor. With Dell and others you can purchase machines for 2 years knowing that the specification will be exactly the same, and that you'll be able to get parts for them for several years after that. The benefits you can get from this in terms of automated builds, consistent environments and simplified inventories shouldn't be underestimated.
One other thing, which I'm suprised hasn't been mentioned elsewhere (that I can see) is the recent Dell decision to ship machines with Ubuntu on. While I wouldn't advocate making a technological business decision based on "good will" you might feel that the promise of good hardware support in future should you ever want to move them to Linux was worth considering.
FOIA only applies to UK Government institutions and companies that are owned by the government. Additionally even if Microsoft did fall under it's scope there is an exclusion for commercially sensitive documents.
How about something like http://www.eff.org/patent/ but for *every* patent owned by Microsoft.
If the value of a company is based in part on the amount of interlectual property it owns, or thinks it owns then having large numbers of them declared invalid even if unrelated to directly to Linux etc. would hurt them.
No. If men were funding breast cancer resarch because they were worried about their women becoming mono-breasted then they'd be even more keen to ensure that they didn't become mono-testicled (assuming the parent means testicular and not prostate cancer). If that was the problem we'd just invent better fake breasts anyway.
I think Dylan Moran summed up the problem well...
"A big erm health scare on for men for testicular cancer, now that's a pretty scary thing there... women don't get that so much. And it's a very difficult thing coz you have to look for a lump...in a bag of lumps, and that can take a long time. And you have to do it yourself, because nobody actually wants to touch male genitalia anyway coz it looks like some kind of deep sea fish, you know that became extinct after about an half an hour, it just didn't do very well. And it's a very difficult thing, you have to do it yourself, you have to touch yourself. And as a man you are designed to be aroused by most naturally occurring phenomena on the plant. You know if you see a big bag of wheat or a bit of falling masonry, that can get you going. So...actually to touch yourself can be very dangerous, you can have 38 erections in a half an hour and get a very bad nose bleed. And its extremely important not to tell anybody if you do find one coz you know what will happen, they lift you shoulder high through the streets going "lump, lump, lump!" and throw you in prison. And then little men will come in and beat you with spoons. That's what happens, they cover it up but that's what happens."
Scary stuff.
...is probably what you want - and KMail appears to support it.
Alternatively Thunderbird certainly supports cache'ing a copy of messages for working offline but I'm not sure if it supports the kind of resyncing that you're looking for.
Or, if it did turn out to take less energy to obtain water from the air at heights than to bring it up there then if we had a very efficient hydro power system in the building we could just drop the water down, get back the potential energy... and voila - cheap power
...that I can see justifying the extra clauses in V3 is one where all the major computer manufacturers decide that their computers will only run those operating systems that are certified with them. Businesses might not object to this (if it was sold as having "security benefits") and so there wouldn't be enough of a market for people who wanted to run their own versions to justify a new "GPL Friendly" hardware company, at least not with the resources that Intel/AMD have at their disposal. The problem with attempting to use the GPL to rememdy this problem is that if the hardware manufactuer is building a check into the hardware but shipping the hardware without the software then the GPL probably doesn't apply to them. It might apply to any OEM shipping Linux with the hardware but I'm sure they'd get round the legal problems by making a click-through that put the responsibility for the combining of the two on to the end user.
For the other lesser cases where there isn't such a barrier to entry I don't see that there's a problem. If someone makes a DVD player that is unmodifyable and publishes the source of it's operating system then if there's a market for a modfiyable one a competitor can simply take the published source and build a competing product. There can also be some legitimate reasons to prevent people from modifying software - "If the work communicates with an online service, it must be possible for modified versions to communicate with the same online service in the same way such that the service cannot distinguish." - sounds to me like it would be impossible to make a GPL'd game that did any kind of hacked client prevention.
I think a likely outcome of all this is that any hardware manufacturer who would be likely to fall foul of these clauses will simply switch to using a non-GPL operating system, commercial or BSD and consequently Linux will miss out on contributions to infrastruture such as embedded cpu support that it might otherwise have recieved. The MPAA (or whoever it is who controls it) may also choose not to grant licences to hardware manufactuers who produce devices can run modified code that they fear could be used to circumvent their DRM.
One which wasn't on http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php would be my choice...
Last year we were interviewing for a helpdesk position and one of the candidates mentioned that he'd written tools to aid posting to LiveJournal. This meant that there was a good chance he had an LJ himself so, out of interest we did some googling and found it.
In it he had written...
-That he was currently suspended from work for misuse of IT equipment.
-That his current duties were less technical than the impression he'd given in the interview.
-That he wasn't really interested in the position we were offering and would be hoping to leave within a few months.
Needless to say he didn't get the position.
His blog also went into some detail about his sexual fetishes. This wouldn't have been a reason not to employ him, but it might have made things a bit awkward in the office especially with him not knowing we knew and such.
We have the same problems at work with the random Citrix printing problems and I'm hoping an upgrade to PS4 etc. soon will fix it.
If it doesn't I've been thinking about just installing a PDF printer driver onto the Citrix servers, configured to either e-mail the files to the user or put it onto a share. For the kind of reports that the users do from Citrix this would be fine, with the added bonus that they have an electronic copy they can send to people if needed.
I'm afraid the less exciting truth is that it's just my chosen e-mail address and vhost. The domain gets very little misaddressed traffic, much less than I used to get when I had a named account on a shared ISP domain.
One hurdle online gaming has to overcome is the low lifespan of each game, from my experience they tend to have a mainstream competative lifespan of about 5 years max (Starcraft being the only exception I can think of). This makes it hard to justify resources spent on promoting leagues if they're only going to last one or two seasons.
Then... GoodCorp produces their own box using the same, or even different hardware to BadCorp's box. They then use the GPL'd source from the first to take onboard all BadCorp's "nifty bits". Everyone buys GoodCorp brand products and there is much rejoicing.
The only situation where this wouldn't work is where people wanted to use BadCorp's ongoing services. While I can see there's a desire to be able to hack everything I don't think it unreasonable that an online gaming service could require that only a console running their signed code was allowed to compete, as that seems to be a separate contract distinct from the supply of the hardware/software.
http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20051 104
What I'd do would be to try to get away from the amount of money an artist earns being directly related to their record sales. I think a model more closely modeled on professional atheletes would be better, a studio would pay a yearly wage to an artist and for that they'd get exclusive access to their work (and possibly their back catalogue). As an artist's popularity went down they'd be paid less which would then free up money for new bands. Some artists would probably choose to become "self employed" and cut out the middle man.
I think this site may have been on slashdot a few years back.
j .edu/~feuss2/fibre/fibre.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010406133220/www.tcn
Assuming that this study isn't a load of crap then it's possible that it coincides with an increase in the availability of childrens TV to passively babysit kids. Cheaper consumer electroncis allowing kids to have their own TVs, the invention of video recorders and satellite channels with only children's programs have all made this easier to do.
Does anyone know if there are any implementations of RAID which use power management? I haven't seen settings mentioned in the bios of any cards I've looked and I've got a feeling that the drives aren't being powered down. Would Linux's software RAID be better for this?
What (I think) you're asking for is an alternative CDDB source for track information when ripping your CDs? If this is the case then, to my knowledge there are only two CDDB (now Gracenote and commercial) and FreeDB. Both of these accept submissions from the general public so you can't guarantee that what they choose to clasify the artists as will be in line with your own opinion.
You can always edit the tracks afterwards, I use the already recommended Tag&Rename myself however there are a number of open source utilities which are just as good especially if you're not using Windows.
Another alternative might be to try Musicbrainz which identifies individual tracks using some kind of hash of the song itself and might have "better" genres assigned to artists.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/074346837 6/qid=1137543821/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl/202- 4708284-5091803
Provides a good background to how the internet came about, including a chapter on email.